A One-String Shovel Guitar Exists and It’s Beautiful

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Bob Clagett taught us how to build a giant lightsaber. Now he’s back, and he gives us his most metal creation yet: the shovel guitar.

Clagett, the star of the I Like to Make Stuff YouTube series, is a veritable purveyor of DIY masterpieces. His latest invention is the shovel guitar, an ordinary, rusty shovel outfitted with a single string, two knobs and an active EMG pickup.

Guitarist Rob Scallon, an equally innovative mind, has already given us such heavy metal classics as “One Fret Song” and “Every Fret Song,” and he got the privilege of first showcasing the shovel, or guitar, or “djent stick”—as he calls it in the video above.

The video begins with a woman’s voice drifting out of a house, asking Scallon for help: “Hey babe, can you get a shovel and help me out in the garden?” The guitarist emerges to scour his collection of shovels. He chooses, of course, the jet-stick, and he proceeds to shred in a ‘90s grunge-style music video with plenty of shots in the woods and fish-eye video lenses.

After his jam, Scallon asserts that all the sounds heard in the video came from the “shovel-guitar-djent-stick thing,” and he reveals that Clagett will be publishing an explanation video to his YouTube channel on March 3.

Clagett’s philosophy is that of wonky utility. “In my projects, I show you every step, and that’s because I want to demystify the process,” he says in the channel’s introduction video. “I want to show you that it’s not that hard, and I want to inspire you to make the stuff that you want to have.”

So, if you want a shovel guitar, tune in and learn how to make your own. And let us know what other awesome projects you’d like to see Clagett undertake in the comments below.